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The MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance provides a variety of tools and mechanisms to help you monitor your "hard to get at" networks and systems.
Here's a taste of a few buzzwords to help get you started: SSH, NRDP, NSCA, Nmap, HTTPS, API, and "another level of indirection".
The MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance is installed on the network at the desired location, and, in most cases, requires no local configuration -- just plug it in and you're ready to start using it. From the comfort of your office chair.
The MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance (MBR) is built on the Raspberry Pi single-board computer and is built to be a reliable appliance for your networks. We have built tools to allow it to run with a read-only filesystem (to save SD card write cycles, and to be perfectly fine even after a power failure), and to allow it to be remotely managed.
In most cases, you can just plug the MBR into a network, and control it from the MonBOX Management Service (MMS). The MMS allows you to control the MBR remotely -- setting configuration, defining monitoring checks to run -- without needing to connect directly to the MBR.
This works because the MBR is configured to use DHCP to configure its network, and then "call home" to the MMS for instructions on what to do. The MBR will download tasks (monitoring checks) and report the results to your monitoring server, either directly using NRDP or NSCA (if your server is directly reachable on the network), or through a proxy, such as the MonBOX Relay Service.
And if interactive configuration through the MMS is not your style, you can use a simple API to control your MBR and the work it does, so that you can integrate it into your existing management tools.
If your MBR is on a network that is accessible to you, you can use the dynamic DNS name for your MBR to find it, or use the MMS to learn the current IP addresses assigned to your MBR. Then you can use the web management interface on the MBR itself to configure and control it, and send active monitoring checks directly to the MBR, using NRPE, or SSH.
The MBR comes pre-loaded with a variety of monitoring plugins (using the standard Nagios plugin distribute, and others), so you can get started right away.
The MBR provides a variety of access methods, so that it can fit into your existing environment with a minimum of adjustment. "Mechanism, not policy."
The MonBOX Management Service (MMS) provides a central control panel for all the MBR's in use in your organization. Through the MMS, you can check the status of your MBR's, control them, and configure monitoring checks to be run on the MBR's.
The MMS makes it easy to configure two styles of monitoring checks in your MBR
Want to see the MMS in action? Request a demo account!
The MonBOX Relay Service provides an NRDP based intermediary -- your MBR can drop off a monitoring check result, and your monitoring server can pick the result up. This means that no direct connection between your monitoring server and your MBR is required (and no inbound traffic through either of your firewalls) in order to monitor remote networks.
The MonBOX Relay Service is modelled after/inspired by the Nagios Reflector Service.
If you want more information on how the MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance and its related services work together, please have a look at the MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance User Guide.
Or get in touch with us and we'll do our best to answer any questions you may have.